


My Words Echoed In Wells Of Silence

by Rynegade (cherrymartini)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Apocalypse, Character Study, M/M, Pining, Season/Series 04
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-06
Updated: 2013-09-06
Packaged: 2017-10-26 22:51:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,085
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/288765
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cherrymartini/pseuds/Rynegade
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean's always been good with words.</p>
            </blockquote>





	My Words Echoed In Wells Of Silence

**Author's Note:**

> Set sometime toward the end of season 4.

Dean has always been good with words, always been able to weave the world around him into something that fit. When Sammy had been a baby he'd told him stories, about dragons and quests and white knights to the rescue. Told him stories with happy endings; the bad guy dies, the good guy gets to go home with the princess and the love of the kingdom. He sometimes wonders now if way back then was the first time he lied, filling Sam's head with the impossible. The good guy dies too you know and nobody gets to go home.

As a child he'd always had the right excuse, why wasn't his Dad wasn’t at the parent teacher meetings, why was he always the one to pick up Sammy. He'd never really lied to Sammy but words were twisted there too, rushing in to fill the spaces between the endless questions of why that Dean had no answer for. _Why don't we have a mum? Why is Dad never here? Why is he always drunk? Why do we have to keep moving? Why don't we have a home Dean?_ And Dean wished he'd just shut up, hoped maybe he's grow out of it.

He never stopped asking but Dean got better at finding the answers.

Dean’s words smoothed as he got older, honey coated persuasion. Talking women into bed, bars into ignoring his lack of ID, teachers into accepting him as substitute guardian for Sam when teachers wanted to talk about his future and Dad hadn't been around in weeks. Lying clear through his teeth when people asked about them, about Dad, about their motel address, about why he was never around, missing classes, detentions.

It didn't matter, by the time they came close to finding discrepancies he was gone anyway, leaving nothing but the story of a boy with no plot and no ending, forgotten just as quickly.

The job has always required him to lie, act a cop, a priest, a prisoner and he never stutters, never slips. Wearing the alias's across his shoulders, soft and warm and moulded to his skin as surely as the leather jacket he's worn for years, pulling them tight until no-one could see the man underneath. There were times he wondered if there was a man underneath, whole and real, or just a collection of almost lives created to save people who wouldn't ever know his name.

To shield him as he lost the people who did.

When Dad had died Sam had talked and raged and questioned and for the first time he hadn’t answered him. Watching his father burn Dean was silent, tongue tied.

__

Dean had never liked promises, heavy and fragile and so easy to break that they tasted bitter on his tongue. The fight to keep the few he made was never ending, collateral damage piling up in the back of his mind, scars writing his war across his skin and he clung to the desperate refrain reciting over and over in his head.

  
_Look after Sammy_  


No matter the cost. The bargain for his soul was just more words, spoken in grief and terror but just words none the less.

Dean denied Alistair words, biting through his tongue in his refusal to beg, to call out to someone who couldn’t hear. He screamed in mindless agony for 30 long, unendurable years until, with nothing left, he broke and that first word bled dark from his cracked lips. 

_Yes_.

It sounded like ruin.

Bitter like promise.

His return should have been silent, alone in a coffin, in an empty field, but a voice he couldn’t remember whispered words he couldn’t understand as he clawed his way through the earth. Syllables sharp and cool with benediction, running through him like thread through a needle until he felt stitched together with its colours.

Second chances only matter when no-one expects him to change. Dean still fills the silences with banter and casework and lyrics pounding from the impala’s speakers, words twisting around him like armour, a litany of misdirection. World’s different now, a whole new enemy lurking on the horizon but the same lines still work the same way, same words to say the same thing just bigger.

__

Castiel is quiet, his sentences succinct, but Dean can hear the soft static of the unspoken hanging in the air around them like a snow storm on pause.  He drowns it out with pop culture references and dirty jokes because there’s nothing like getting the awkwardness lost in translation.  

Dean learns to read his looks, learns to hear the truth in Cas’ silence as everything he doesn’t say winds itself around Dean’s mind while he searches for the meaning. 

And there is meaning. In every one of Castiel’s pauses, in the hush that lay heavy with unnamed intent between them. Dean thinks maybe there’s more meaning in that calm stare than in all of his words and more and more finds himself staring back, mouth shut. With his thoughts gone still and his words seeping away into the sea of unsaid, he thinks somehow Cas hears him anyway.

The apocalypse is crashing down around them and Dean wants to yell his rage into the heavens, he just doesn’t think it would help anymore, maybe it would have back when there was still the smallest chance that there was something up there to care, but it’s too late now for maybe.  

He wants to whisper his fear into the soft curls at the base of Cas’ neck and let his shaking fingers trace desperate hope into smooth skin, he wants to drag him so close he can hear all those unuttered words humming in his blood, he wants to fall into his stare until all the world is blue, but he thinks maybe it’s too late for that too. 

Dean knows this _thing_ burning in the silence has a name, knows it has intent. But it’s the end of days and he knows this fight could really only end two ways, and they both threaten to rip his heart clear through his mouth. Dean’s betting on blood and death but hey, maybe he didn’t lie to Sam, maybe at the end of the day the good guy really does get to go home. And that shouldn’t jar and rub raw, it shouldn’t leave him terrified and tongue-tied but it does.

Because Dean’s not really the princess type and there’s one thing he never learnt how to say.

 

 

.  



End file.
